Trouble Getting Prospects on the Phone?

If you’ve been in sales for 5+ years, you’ve seen a version of this movie before. Once again, the low-hanging fruit (easy sales/opportunities) has dried up.

But this time seems different.

It doesn’t “feel” like a bump in the road as we’ve experienced in past down periods.

Many companies have followed the “Predictable Revenue” model in the past ten years by hiring “SDRs” to be mass email prospectors and marketers. And it was working—for a while.

Now, however, more and more companies require their sales teams to make more dials as most email prospecting campaigns produce less than a 10% response rate and have an estimate of gaining only one client (closed/won) per 1,000 emails. (And I’ve seen it as high as 10,000 emails)

Good Times / Bad Times

Selling by phone has always had one thing consistent through the ups and downs of the market:

It’s hard to get prospects on the phone.

It’s even harder when there isn’t enough inertia.

According to Google AI, Inside sales representatives “Make around 33 cold calls per day on average, and have about 6.6 conversations per day” – AND WE KNOW this is a generous estimation.

When meeting with new clients, I ask the individuals on a sales team how many dials per day they average – and then I ask their sales managers to pull the reports (for those who track this all-important metric)

95% of the time, the sales reps have overestimated the number of dials they make daily—by a lot. They think they are making more dials than they are.

Side note: to see how many dials per day is optimal, watch this video short.

For the past few years, most inside sales teams have relied too heavily on email and posting on LinkedIn and have neglected the phone, allowed their phone sales skills to get rusty, or were never taught how to sell correctly over the phone.

So, what are sales teams to do?

The answer is: get back to basics.

Here’s where to start:

1. Know Your ICP. You have to know what your best prospects look like. Analyze your current closed/won accounts, filter them down to who your BEST clients are, and then determine what they all have in common. Tip: Look for similarities like annual revenue, location, industry, and employee size, to name a few key aspects to get you started. This video may help.
2. Know what to say and how to say it before you pick up the phone. There are very few successful “Captain Wing-Its” in the sales world. The best of the best, the ones earning the biggest paychecks, have a game plan before ever picking up the phone.
3. Time management. Once you identify your ICP, build your prospect list, and craft your OVS (Opening Value Statement), it’s time to hit the phones. There are several “call block” plans you can implement.

One sales time management example is:

• 9 am – 9:45 am nothing but dials.
• 9:45 am – 10:00 am: break/check/respond to email
• 10 am – 10:45 am nothing but dials.
• 10:45 am – 11:00 am: break/check/respond to email
• 11 am – Noon: Power Hour #1: nothing but dials.

Dealing with Rejection

You will get more rejections than sales if you do it right.

Let me repeat: You will get more rejections than sales if you do it right.

What that means is if you are only calling leads that are “laydowns,” how will you survive now that the low-hanging fruit is (temporarily) dried up? How will you survive, let alone get ahead, if you only call a handful of leads?

Check the ego and insecurities at the door. I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when getting hung up on was celebrated by co-workers and managers alike.

Are those days gone forever? Maybe, and maybe with good reason. But the lessons I learned back then are how to survive today.

Identify your ICP. Build your target list. Know exactly what to say before picking up the phone.

Start dialing.

Put in the work.

When you reach the end of the day and make your appropriate number of dials and still don’t get anyone on the phone, log off of work knowing you did everything in your power. If/when you come in the next day and do it all over again and again and again, consistently, you will be rewarded.

And remember: Pressure is a privilege.